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Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I was recently offered an affiliate link for a company that charges $20/mo for its service. They offered me $25 per sign up, and the end-user gets 50% off using my affiliate link.

I am not an unethical person, but the thought of arbitrage did cross my mind...

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This seems pretty different -- you have a relationship with that company. Probably there's like a contract, right? They must have included something in the fine print about not taking advantage of the service yourself (unless they are, like, real dumb).

Restaurants have no obligations to random people on the internet who decide to re-sell their food without permission.

Not the same, but this reminds me of years and years ago when Google was giving away free AdWords credit. I think I got $75, and spent it on ads using my affiliate link for another service that offered credit for affiliate signups. I very easily maxed out my credit allowance for that. Not long after, the company got wind of what was going on and added something to their affiliate terms to disallow that.

It's funny, because there was no deception involved: the ad text I used was something like "Sign up for [service] and get $[discount] off", which was true, as the affiliate link offered a discount for the person signing up (in addition to the credit I would get as the affiliate). The company in the end just didn't like that I spent $75 of someone else's money to acquire customers for them.

Why wouldn't they like that?

Because they can pay Google directly. The affiliate links are for people with existing readers/clients to push them toward the company, not for finding randos on Google search.

Presumably the affiliate program is more cost-effective than paying Google directly, or why even have it?

Maybe the customers kelnos found were much lower quality than normal affiliate customers? That's the only reason I would think this makes sense money-wise.

It's also possible they didn't want to anger google with "misspent" free credits.

But it's also possible they had an ego about it.

There was a lot of this for awhile with various affiliate links.

When I worked at Coinbase, a Data Scientist did that to some huge volume. Company didn't care. Instead of hiring a bunch of people to manage ads, it was someone doing it in off-hours for $10 per signup.

I’m not clear where ethics fits in here. Was that expressly limited? They’re offering you an affiliate link to drive conversions - they’ve externalized sales to you - what (more) permission do you need from them?

They’re paying you to get real people to sign up with the intention of using the service. If you sign up a bunch of sock puppet accounts, or pay a bunch of people to sign up for a month and then cancel, then you aren’t holding up your part of the (perhaps unwritten) deal

That would indeed be unethical. But not passing along a referral code and subdividing profits from there.

That's just fraud not arbitrage. If you include illegal activities you could "arbitrage" almost anything

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